I’m more active on twitter these days than on this blog, but since there is no room for letters on twitter, I’m publishing them here.

Sent to NY Post Apr. 13 and again on Apr. 18th:

Dear Editor:

What a predictable disappointment to read the following sentence in Mike Gonzalez’s “Why the ‘Trump’ State Dept still loves George Soros” (Apr. 7): “Soros’ Open Society Foundation and network of groups does some good in some places — by fighting Vladimir Putin’s bullying of Ukraine, for example.”

There is no contradiction between the things Mr. Gonzalez doesn’t like about Soros, and Soros “standing up to Putin’s bullying of Ukraine.” Both things are bad. Mr. Gonzalez needs a reminder of the Ayn Rand maxim: If you encounter a contradiction, check your original premise, because it’s probably wrong.

Soros isn’t just some leftist figure about whom “conservatives find some things repugnant,” as Mr. Gonzalez also writes. He is a malevolent force of nature who in addition to toppling economies — which everyone does know about — works in the shadows as an unofficial arm of the U.S. and UK “deep state” to topple governments.

The Western narrative on Ukraine (and on Russia in general) — like its cartoonish narrative on the 1990s Balkans wars — is made out of whole cloth, for gullible American consumption. Soros’s people were instrumental in toppling the democratically elected Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych, yet another of our hands-on revolutions after which we had the nerve to force the issue of whether Russia meddled in our election. Seriously? It’s that latest US meddling that pushed ethnic Russians in Crimea to have a referendum to rejoin Russia, as they didn’t want to be governed by our approved Ukrainian fascists. We labeled Russia’s engagement in this as “aggression.” Never mind the Kosovo blueprint we laid out for it — much less justifiably and self-relevantly, but more violently –18 years ago. That’s where this all began. And yet we insist on bringing it full circle.

What the public caught onto with the 2016 election was the parody of the blame-Russia canard. But this was not just some DNC foible; it was an over-the-top expression of an already in-place, bipartisan target-Russia mentality that made the Democrats feel they could take it to satirical levels with a straight face.

And so here we are. Allied with Islam against a fellow-infidel nation that tried to be our partner in what everyone in ‘91 agreed was a new era of US-Russian cooperation against a common global threat. We chose the threat, sending the message that we’ll take barbarians over Slavs. Nice. The last time there was near unanimity on an illegal bombing of a sovereign nation (in this case Syria), we inexplicably leveled Yugoslavia and unleashed jihad. Keep digging, America.

I come from a family of refusenik escapees from Russia, and was raised a Russophobe. But this is ridiculous. Shame on America for out-propagandizing and out-Sovietizing the USSR’s successor state, which has been on the right side of international legality for the past 20 years as we’ve dismantled the very order we helped build after WWII, while “democratizing” the world right back to the 7th century.

Submitted to Washington Times on Apr. 19 7& 20th:

Dear Editor:

Tammy Bruce disappoints (“Hillary Clinton’s Revenge Tour, and Nikki Haley’s Ascent,” Apr. 12). What Ms. Bruce hails in Haley is the very thing that made Hillary Clinton so dangerous, voted Most Likely to Lead us to Nuclear War. Ms. Bruce refers to Haley’s “virtuoso handling of an international crisis, replete with chemical weapons, mass murder, terrorist groups, Russia and Iran…She did not bend, she controlled the environment, and led.”

The reason Russia’s UN rep had such a disgusted look on his face during Haley’s “leadership” display is he knew the charade that was playing out, the “crisis” manufactured (the rebels had every reason to stage a chemical attack while Assad had every reason not to).

Enter the plethora of columns like Ms. Bruce’s, unwittingly reinforcing America’s road to perdition. Haley’s laudable UN-scolding aside, she represents continuity not only of Obama’s Russia-hawk pentagram of harpies — Power-Rice-Jarrett-Nuland-Clinton (“If women ran the world there’d be no war”?) — but also of stuck-in-cold-war Obama supporter Condoleezza Rice, who likewise did the chest-thumping thing where it wasn’t deserved or constructive (toward Russia), while glad-handing our Islamic “friends.” The former hasn’t killed an American in decades, while the latter…well, you do the math. Rice herself was a continuity of Clinton-era Madeleine Albright, who led the march toward our Target-Russia mentality when she targeted the previous designated villain–those surrogate Russians known as Serbs–in a war that’s proving to have been a dry-run against Russia. Indeed, the last time we saw this kind of near unanimity on foreign policy, we leveled Yugoslavia and unleashed jihad.

I’m sorry, but this “toughness” is Foreign Policy for Dummies, and these days that includes my previously exalted fellow conservatives. In fact, the toughness masks a pusillanimity: reluctance to fight the more intractable and politically sensitive but more real, hostile and deadly threat — which professes itself such hourly.

Like many conservatives, Bruce and Haley are inclined to believe that in foreign affairs we’re the “good guys.” The bullet-points that Haley (and everyone else) is hitting Russia with are not eliciting current US actions and responses; they are responses to U.S. actions, intrigues, broken promises, and trampling of the postwar order we ourselves helped build. The sleeping bear is finally, belatedly behaving the way we poked and poked at it to behave. This was all scripted a long time ago. Just because Americans weren’t paying attention to U.S.-Russia relations until cued to do so by our Political-Intel-Media Axis — as it conveniently started the clock for us at Crimea 2014 — doesn’t mean some of us didn’t notice (and futilely warn) that the stage was being set all along.

Sending the message that we prefer barbarians to Russians — and the enmity of the former to the friendship of the latter — tells Russia there’s no place for it in the civilized world, so forage elsewhere. Enter the ever-closer relationship with Iran. My father scoffs that he once scoffed at the prophecy pamphlet the missionaries handed him when he came to this country in 1974: the Soviet Union would fall; airplanes would fly into buildings; and Russia would help Iran build a nuclear bomb.

What a sick twist that it’ll be Trump — clearly goaded into “showing strength” (while showing Muslims he cares) — who will prove prophecy inescapable. After all, we voted against the candidate enthusiastically leading us toward it while Trump had the instincts to avoid it.

Ms. Bruce concludes with, “Everyone at the U.N. now knows who is in charge. And it’s not the boys from Syria, Russia or Iran.”

Actually, it will be. Because when you’re playing war games and justifying them with shallow rhetoric packaged for American consumption, you’re going to get schooled by more ancient nations. Nations which, incidentally, have lived with Muslims in their midst a lot longer and smarter than we have.

As an escapee from Russia, I was raised a Russophobe, but this is ridiculous. I’m sorry for the lesson coming to America, but we asked for it.